Dr. Linda Lambert is a best-selling author of books on leadership, educator, international consultant and now, a novelist of historical fiction. She is currently compelled to bring the worlds of leadership and literature together around themes of liberation, empathy and learning.

A sizzling new novel set in Taos, New Mexico. The third in the Justine Trilogy, preceded by the award-winning, The Cairo Codex and The Italian Letters. Buy it at your local independent bookstore, IndieBound.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other online retailers.

Conceptions of leadership have evolved, and Liberating Leadership Capacity captures these new ideas and provides a pathway to create sustainable systems of high leadership capacity. Available April 2016 from Teachers College Press, your local independent bookstore, IndieBound.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other online retailers.

Writing the Novel: Fiction versus Non-Fiction

Post Dec. 28

The story of the two Kents (Haruf and Nelson) in my last post represented two ends of the cognition spectrum: stories that spring organically from experience…and stories that present themselves in a more systematic way. The common ingredient: imagination and fine writing.

Imagination is still the driving force, regardless of how we bring it to life. Because I had written non-fiction texts in leadership before turning to the novel genre, I brought along many strategies that serve me well in my former life. Many of those strategies got in the way!! They had to be discarded, often painfully.

In non-fiction, a writer leads the reader down a primrose path to understanding, bridging and looping ideas, repeating key points, closing arguments—all in service of thorough understanding.

But what about: Surprise? Puzzlement? Tension? Not if you can help it.My first draft of a novel read like a graduate thesis. But surely some practices served me well in fiction as well as non-fiction…what were they?